The billionaire investor Peter Thiel has accused Google of “treason” and called for a law enforcement investigation of the search engine’s parent company. He speculated that the Chinese government has invaded its employee ranks. A German immigrant via South Africa, Thiel is not alone; his remarks echo the repeated assertions of the rabble rouser Steve Bannon that there are too many Asian CEOs in Silicon Valley.
These claims, combined with similar charges of wrongdoing against students and professors of Chinese origin on campuses across the country, are as ominous as they are lurid. While Thiel presents no evidence, Bannon displays ample prejudice. They are inspiring paranoia about everyone of Chinese heritage.
At a Sunday appearance which opened the National Conservatism Conference in Washington DC followed by an appearance with the Fox TV host Tucker Carlson, Thiel, the founder of the PayPal financial service, relied on rhetorical questions. He asked Google who was working on artificial intelligence, whether “senior management considers itself to have been thoroughly infiltrated” and if the Chinese would steal the information anyway.
Google answered by reiterating that “we do not work with the Chinese military”.
Thiel left Silicon Valley last year in protest over its liberalism. He is also behind Palantir, the secretive surveillance firm, and has been a supporter of tariffs. Google had been reported to be developing a China-compatible search engine codenamed Dragonfly. They stopped due to employee objections.
The open hostility to Chinese people, as distinct from the Chinese government, violates norms integral to America itself. On the face of these utterances is the identification of a community, named by ancestry, as a problem. Last year, the FBI director, Christopher Wray, characterized it as a “whole of society” threat to American values.
Guilt by association is not what the American Dream has promised to those who have sacrificed everything for that proverbial opportunity. Whatever the Chinese government may be up to, their policies should not compromise the status of Chinese people, almost all of whom are ordinary folks, not spies, “sleepers”, agents of influence or otherwise conspirators.
Although in this new Yellow Peril, a specific ethnicity is targeted as a group, no line is drawn between citizens and foreigners. The original Yellow Peril was the notion, promoted by Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II in the late 19th century and by the American author Jack London, that Asians might contend against Europeans and white Americans in a contest of racial superiority. Propagandists such as Lothrop Stoddard wrote titles that would summarize the thesis: The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy was a 1920 bestseller.
Nowadays as earlier, the people who fear an Asian takeover of Silicon Valley do not bother to add that Asians who become Americans are acceptable. They cannot distinguish by looking at a lineup of random Asians, whether the one is a visiting scholar “fresh off the boat” in that pejorative phrase being reappropriated, the other a sixth-generation Californian “banana” (yellow on the outside, white on the inside, in another derogatory term). If they did clarify that they meant no disparagement of those whose families came before their own, at least they would be pure nativists rather than also racists.
The confusion of Asians overseas and “Asian Americans” (a concept coined during the social justice movements circa 1968) has been a recurring theme throughout history. Demagogues succeeded in persuading Congress to pass the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. They argued the “Orientals” would outcompete Occidental rivals but remain loyal to a foreign empire. The prohibition was then expanded to an Asiatic Barred Zone intended to maintain ethnic proportions favoring white Anglo-Saxon Protestants in the American population (even Catholics, Jews and Europeans too southern and eastern were to be limited albeit not as strictly). Japanese Americans were locked up during the second world war no matter that they were bona fide United States citizens two generations removed from Tokyo and baseball-playing Christians.
Even those Asians who sought to assimilate had to fight for their rights. The federal government opposed Wong Kim Ark’s petition to be recognized as a citizen, because of his Chinese heritage. They argued he could have no better status than his forebears despite his birth on United States soil, and they stated that citizenship would be degraded if he were admitted into the fold. The supreme court, however, ruled in 1898 that he was protected by the same 14th amendment to the constitution that extended citizenship to African Americans and, they did not hesitate to declare, all persons regardless of color.
Ironically, these sentiments are surging into populist politics as the celebration of the transcontinental railroad comes to a close. One hundred fifty years ago at Promontory Point, Utah, the continent was united with the “Golden Spike” joining the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific lines. Ten to fifteen thousand Chinese laborers had constituted the bulk of the workforce on the western side of what was the greatest infrastructure project the nation had ever attempted. They blasted through mountains, performing heroic deeds, demonstrating competence and efficiency to be admired or envied, such as laying 10 miles of a track in a single day to finish according to the schedule.
Yet those Chinese pioneers were left out of the festivities, as well as the centennial commemoration featuring actor John Wayne. They were finally given their due this spring thanks to their American descendants insisting on their equality.
Civil rights and national interest are compatible. For those who fear Chinese will help China in achieving global dominance, there is a remedy: turn those Chinese into Chinese Americans who will contribute to the United States, or who will embrace a conception of belonging that is cosmopolitan instead of nationalistic. There could be no greater gift for Shenzhen and Shanghai, the perceived usurpers of western centers of technology and finance, respectively, than to drive out Chinese who otherwise would be stakeholders on this side of the Pacific Ocean.
Google relies on Chinese, Chinese immigrants and Chinese American engineers, alongside numerous Indians and other Asians, as do other technology firms. Only a few of those experts are promoted to executives.
So it is true that there are many Chinese, Indians, other Asians and entrepreneurs from the world over who are attracted to these shores. That is to be celebrated. If they were to leave, however voluntary their departure, that would ruin the economy. Thiel and Bannon expose the real conflict: between those who value democracy and diversity and those who do not.
Frank H Wu is William L Prosser Distinguished Professor at the University of California
